Re: Need a regex for matching multiple words within parentheses

[hanenkamp]

There are a couple obvious problems.

First, (.). in the third match should contain a quantifier and you should be careful of "." as a greedy match will swallow the end parenthesis and cause the match to fail. I'd use (\S+) or (.+?).

Second, you should have another backslash before the very last closing parenthesis.

Note: I didn't take the time to test these recommendations.

Update: Er...duh, don't do that...

Update: That is, don't do the striked one, it will get the first word (or more if there is no whitespace between), but the other works fine. Sorry, I was unclear.

[Not_a_Number]

Er...duh, don't do that...

Why not? Your suggestion - with (.+?) - works fine for me:

while ( <DATA> ) {
   if ( /^ALTER\s+TABLE\s+
         (\w+)                   # $1
         \s+ADD\s+CONSTRAINT\s+
         (\w+)                   # $2
         \s+PRIMARY\s+KEY\s+\(\s*
         (.+?)                   # $3
         \s*\)/x ) {

      print "\$1: <$1> \$2: <$2> \$3: <$3>\n";
   }
}
__DATA__
ALTER TABLE ORDERS ADD CONSTRAINT PK_ORDER_ORDER_NUM PRIMARY KEY ( ORD
+ER_NUM)
ALTER TABLE ORDER_ITEMS ADD CONSTRAINT PK_ORDER_NUM_ITEMS PRIMARY KEY 
+( ORDER_NUM, ITEM_NUM, SUB_TYPE )

++hanenkamp (or have I missed something?)

dave